Headlining the Husqvarna team is Ruben Faria, the Portuguese rider a familiar name for anyone who has been following rally raid racing or the Dakar Rally. Faria will be joined by two-time Enduro World Champion Pierre-Alexandre Renet from France, and Dakar stage-winner Pablo Quintanilla of Chile.

The team doesn’t have long before the 2016 Dakar Rally, but Husqvarna hopes for a podium result at the iconic race. The team will campaign on the Husqvarna FR450, which we assume will closely resemble the KTM 450 Rally.

Casey Stoner is to leave Honda and work with Ducati as a test rider and brand ambassador from 2016. Two press releases, one from Honda and one from Ducati, today confirmed the rumor that had emerged at Valencia during the race weekend, and especially after the test.

Honda thanked Stoner for five years of collaboration, including two years of racing, during which he won fifteen races and a MotoGP championship. After his retirement, at the end of 2012, Stoner continued as a test rider for HRC, but rode only sporadically, no more than a couple of days a year.

This, it appears, seems to have been the trigger for Stoner to make the switch to Ducati as a test rider. The Australian had always retained good ties with the Italian factory, and the arrival of Gigi Dall’Igna as the head of Ducati Corse made a return to Ducati even more attractive.

Stoner knows Dall’Igna well from his time racing an Aprilia in 125s and 250s, a period in which he finished as runner up in the 250 championship to Dani Pedrosa.

Aleix Espargaro has fractured a vertebra in a training accident. The factory Suzuki rider was out training on an off-road bike, when he landed heavily from a jump, and felt pain in his back.

He was taken to hospital, where an MRI scan revealed a flexion fracture of the vertebra, which will force him to miss the Sepang test planned for next week.

The injury suffered by Espargaro should not see him out of action for long. The Spaniard was discharged from hospital on Friday morning, and will now have to rest for a two to three week period to allow him to recover.

BMW aftermarket parts specialist Wunderlich really knows how to promote itself. The German company is known for its one-off machines and concepts, some which have tipped BMW’s hand when it comes to new models. For a boutique German brand, it is impressive that it is known around the world.

So, it shouldn’t surprise us that Wunderlich is grabbing headlines once again, this time with an intriguing concept: a two-wheel drive BMW R1200GS that uses a hybrid drivetrain with an electric front-end that was developed with Italy’s electric specialist Evolt.

Wunderlich calls its creation the BMW R1200GS LC, and it features a 10 kW hub motor on its front wheel, in addition to the GS’s boxer-twin gas engine. The electric motor has regenerative braking, which helps charge its modest battery pack (located under the front beak, to our eye).

The FIM today released the provisional 2016 calendar for the World Superbike championship. There is good news and bad news in the calendar, with Portimao disappearing from the calendar, but Monza making a welcome return.

World Superbikes will also be returning to Germany, with the entire circus turning up to the Lausitzring, just north of Dresden.

The best news is that there are no direct clashes with MotoGP, but WSBK will be running on the same date as F1 for nine rounds, though only the Donington and Monza rounds happen in the same timezone.

Given the different time schedules for F1 and WSBK, bike racing fans should not have to miss any of the action.

After an eight-day public inquiry, the decision was taken to approve the deregistering of common land needed for construction of the site. That clears the way for construction work to start once financing is in place.

The request to deregister common land was approved on the basis of extra land – 320 hectares, or some 800 acres – being provided to replace the deregistered land.

The Planning Inspector charged with examining the proposal judged that the overall effect of the land swap would benefit the nature conservation efforts in the area.

Bimota is known for making drool-worthy motorcycles, and at EICMA the boutique Italian brand debuted two fine motorcycles. But, we think the real show-stopper for Bimota was its add-on supercharger system for its Ducati-powered motorcycles.

Good for 15% to 20% more power (probably more, if you like to tinker), the Bimota supercharger kit uses a Sprintex dual-screw supercharger, which has been tastefully made to match the belt covers on the Ducati Testastretta engine.

As you can see from the photos below, the supercharger looks pretty damn good, especially when paired with the “Bimota Experience” package, which adds a carbon fiber frame and swingarm to the chassis.

The Bimota Impeto is the first model to officially have the supercharger as an option, but the Italians say it can be made to work with any of its water-cooled Ducati-powered models.

For 2016, Triumph is revamping its Tiger Explorer offering, and like with the Tiger 800, the big adventure-touring machine gets a bevy of different variations to cater to a wider variety of riders.

The lineup is a bit of an alphabet soup, so we’ll try and break it down for you. First up, there are two basic models: the Tiger Explorer XR & Tiger Explorer XC. The XR is Triumph’s on-road ADV bike, while the XC is geared to go off-road.

Within the Triumph Tiger XR on-road line, the base XR model is the cheapest and most basic model, and the line has two higher-spec machines: the XRx & XRt. Similarly, the the Triumph Tiger XC off-road line and the XC is base model. The higher-spec off-road models are the XCx and XCa.

We asked Triumph to clarify the differences between the four higher spec models, and the six models in general, but it seems that the OEM doesn’t have that answer at their fingertips. I have no words to respond to that with.

There’s no information on the company’s website, we’ll tell you just about everything that is in the company’s press release in this article, and it seems even other publications don’t seem to have an answer – this is a first for me, in my seven years of running Asphalt & Rubber.